Lost In Space

IMDB
First time viewed: No
Current Release: No
Watched With: Myself

I don't think much has changed about my views on this film since I first viewed it except about the effects. Dated CG effects. It's still a relatively early big effects show that were all pretty much state of the art at the time and I believe the sheer volume of work set a record at the time. But they do not hold up so well.

Listening to the writer and director commentary on the new bluray you can sense a lot of missed opportunity and regrets about the film making process. They were breaking such new ground there was no-one around to tell them how to do it or, from the sounds of things, how to manage the editing and effects and the impact that had on story changes very late in the game.

It goes a long way to explain some of the films flaws (of which there are many) but not all of them. Looking past dated effects, at it's heart this is still a disjointed movie. It was interesting hearing about test screening with incomplete effects hence the edit didn't make sense and they were forced to mess up what probably would have worked had they waited until the effects were completed.

As true as that is I can't imagine any original version of the 3rd act of this film working. The time travel nonsense is probably the more ridiculous I've ever seen in any film. I'm a HUGE time travel geek and have very specific ideas about how I like to see it portrayed but even in films like Back to the Future that logically make no sense at all I let them get away with it because the films at least keep a sense of internal logic and also, they are fun. This film has no logic and it's not very fun. Time travel is tricky and whatever this was is a great example of why.

The biggest crime of this film is probably Blarp. A precursor to a certain Gungan in a way. The cute loveable animal comedy relief that is neither cute or loveable or comedic. Utterly bizarre. The effect is very cartoonish which doesn't help, again probably a limitation of the technology at the time. The extra features show the CG was actually puppeteered and that they are a real puppet on set that they later decided to replace with cg. Last minute CG especially in this day and age is probably not a good idea. Why not just cut him from the film?

Tone. What is going on here? It's a silly slapstick kids movie one minute that no adult would want to sit though then a cool action sci-fi that is far to dark and intense for little kids. Horrible lines, overt sexual innuendo, bizarre designs (albeit some are cool), strange character arcs, confusing timeline issues… It really is all over the place. What is gary olden doing? Apparently he's not as cartoonish as in the TV series but he still seems to be on a different plane to everyone else. Eh, I dunno. Matt LeBlanc in a feature film? Has that happened since?

The best thing about the film is the score, the Apollo 440 remix of the original John Williams theme that goes over the end credits and how important it I think it must have been to set up the pipeline for future effects heavy films and seeing what works and what doesn't. I do love watching old CG. I remember at the time thinking how CG would revolutionise special effects and how realistic everything looked. I look at these now and don't know how I could ever have thought those spiders were any good. This was pre-colour grading too so a lot of the colours don't match as well, the light levels and contrast and change from shot to shot.

Fascinating to hear the CG artists explain that computers can't really bounce light so you have to add in lights for literally everything in a scene to fake the radiosity, or that they could but the amount of computing power it would need makes it next to impossible. I can do it now on my laptop.

An Interesting milestone. There is some fun to be had here. I'm glad I got the Bluray, it was very cheap and the commentaries offer great insight. Sometimes bad films have the best commentaries. You can learn a lot from other peoples mistakes.